Dell has this week introduced a new OptiPlex business-ready desktop, a model dubbed OptiPlex 3020 that promises to offer 'industry-leading performance and best-in-class security in a budget-friendly package'.

Coming in two versions - Minitower (MIT) and Small Form Factor (SFF), this compact PC features a tool-free design and packs a 4th gen Intel Core processor, up to 16 GB of RAM, Intel HD 4600 graphics, either a hard drive or a solid-state hybrid drive (for up to 2 TB of storage on the minitower SKU), one PCIe x16 slot for graphics expansion, two USB 3.0 ports, and VGA and DisplayPort 1.2 outputs. The OptiPlex 3020 starts at $499.

What little love I had for Optiplex's was gone when I was tasked with creating a mass grave for the things, after years of having chocolate wrappers stuffed into the fans, pencils jabbed into the drive bays, and peanuts crushed into the heatsinks (welcome to British High Schoolers), I was glad to see them go after RMA'ing approximately 250+ PSU's. All that being said, the HP 6800 VPro's that replaced them were equally suicidual, they were like crack whores when it came to sucking up as much dust as their puny little 80mm PSU fans could take before crapshooting their bearings.

Dunno bout that, I sort of liked those machines. They were before their time though...

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I just bought a GX620 for an auto shop computer and it burnt up in one night of idling, the south bridge was smoking hot, and no video output ever again. So he gave me a GX520 to replace it, and it runs better, but the hard drive overheats when writing a lot of data - the case design is garbage, the only fans are the CPU fan and the power supply fan, there's literally no airflow to the hard drives or motherboard. Oh, and they are proprietary systems, not standard ATX, so the motherboard screw holes won't line up with ATX boards and the front panel connections are all in one Dell connector, so forget about repairs/upgrades.
All the boards, chipsets, and CPUs ran hot in the P4 era, and they all knew it, but still designed millions of machines with little or no airflow, probably because fan technology was crude then and people wanted quiet PCs. Or maybe they purposely designed them to fry shortly after the warranty was up, to sell more units...

The name Optiplex makes me shudder, and reminds me of the old optiplex GX270's and GX620's. Times I would rather forget about during the P4 era.

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The newer OptiPlex machines are decent (boring) business machines with low-wattage power supplies. The GX270's were horrible about having bad capacitors. I haven't had to recap anything newer than a 745 (yet). I bought an off-lease 760 for my kids to use, and it works okay.

Nice to know, but the BTX standard is dead as far as consumer boards go, so you have to buy a Dell board, usually "refurbished", which can be bought for $30-$50 at places like Server Supply. But you still have a low-spec, hot running board that will probably self-destruct if you try to run a medium-fast video card. This was before solid Japanese capacitors became common on motherboards, and the VRM section on these boards are a joke. I have modded a few Dell cases to improve airflow, but it's a losing proposition in the end unless you're only using it for low-power office tasks.